Monthly Archives: September 2003

Pro Blogs and Editing

I’m so far behind the blog news cycle on this story that the New York Times managed to publish a story on this before I did, but I’ve been asked by one of my readers to comment on the “edited blog” fracas involving the Sacramento Bee and a blog run by one of its reporters. […]

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Liars

If this isn’t the most-linked article at Blogdex by this time tomorrow, I suspect I’ll have to eat my hat: It’s an alternate history of the Iraq conflict, culled from various proclamations of Bush administration members (I wish it had been annotated). From a purely rhetorical point of view it’s monstrously unfair, but frankly it […]

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Small Note

Two, actually. 1. I have subscriptions to both Electronic Gaming Monthly and Smithsonian Magazine, which I suggest puts me well in the running for the hotly-contested Most Cultural Distance Between Two Magazine Subscriptions Award. Feel free to discuss this or challenge me with your own subscription quirks. I dare yas! 2. Speaking of EGM, the […]

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Radio, Radio

I did a radio interview for CBC Radio while I was at Torcon, and a snippet of it shows up in this radio program (Real player required). The segment I’m in starts at about the 17-minute mark, so you can fast-forward to that part if you like. I’m the guy making the comment about the […]

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Fast Reader

I read fast. I’ve never specifically clocked myself at a words-per-minute rate (there’s something a little too needfully MENSA-like about doing crap like that), but it’s fast enough that in college I was able to read every single book (but one) assigned in my class on Joseph Conrad the night before the final, a total […]

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My Other Online Self

No less an august personage than my own wife has noted that in the By The Way… blog, I have a distinctly different voice than I do here on the Whatever. Her full realization of this came when I posted an entry about someone criticizing me and rather than laying into him as I might […]

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Radio Interview

Wanna hear me on the radio? I’ll be on tomorrow (that’s Friday, 9/19) at 5:20pm (Eastern) on KFTK, St. Louis (97.1), on the Dave Glover show. I’ll be talking about Book of the Dumb. Streaming audio is here. If you miss it, I’ll be doing several more interviews over the course of the next month, […]

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Five Years

As of this week, I’ve been writing the Whatever for five years, which makes it the single longest writing “gig” I’ve ever had, if you can believe that. I began it in 1998 with the intent of keeping sharp for writing newspaper columns, because I’d been a newspaper columnist once and was hoping to be […]

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Old Man’s War Release Date — An Update

Okay, my fiction agent chatted with Tor and got the new release date for Old Man’s War, which is (drum roll) November 2004. Yes, 14 months from now and 23 months from when the book was initially acquired. That’s publishing for you. Again, let me stress I’m not in the slightest nonplussed about this; the […]

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My Secret Vice

I like reading online personals. Yes, yes, yes. I know. My marriage is fine, people. Better than fine, even. You don’t purchase a new automobile (a minivan, no less) with a spouse if you’re looking to trade them in. If I had purchased some sexy expensive two-seater convertible despite the facts of child, large dog […]

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The New Car

Here it is. It is a 2003 Honda Odyssey EX. The color is called “Sandstone Metallic,” which is Honda’s way of trying to avoid the word “beige,” and sure, if it makes them happy, fine, whatever. However, I know it is beige and will thus refer to it that way. There were other minivans that […]

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Cars

We’re buying a new car today. No, I won’t tell you what it is. You’ll just have to wait. However, one word: Capacious. I’m off to handle the actual purchasing of the car, since I’m the bum in the family and Krissy has to go off to work. However, as promised, she was the one […]

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A Coke Out of Nostrils Experience

“Romeo and Juliet is a Goddamn timeless template. I saw it set in Ireland with an all female cast and it still worked, one family was all lesbians and one was all dinosaurs. You just can’t fuck it up. You dab your eyes at the end and wonder what is so wrong about the love […]

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Expungable

I just expunged a comment on the previous post where someone posted an advertisement for themselves which was totally irrelevant to the post in question, and then about a week ago I expunged a comment that was nothing more than hyperlinks to porn sites (made somewhat less effective because I’ve turned off html in comments), […]

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The Death of a Car

My 1989 Ford Escort Pony (i.e., the low-end variation of the low-end model of Ford’s line-up) has 150,150 miles on it and has chosen this auspicious mileage number to pretty much die upon. Its death has been anticipated for weeks if not months, but today was the day it signaled that the end is near, […]

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Old Man’s War Stuff

A couple of things I learned about Old Man’s War while I was at Torcon: 1. Its release has been rescheduled for sometime in the second half of 2004, once again for marketing purposes related to the Tor line in general. I am almost entirely unconcerned. It’s been sold, I’ve gotten paid, and I trust […]

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All About Torcon

So, Torcon. To begin, I almost didn’t get there. Stupid, stupid me, I forgot that Canada was in fact a foreign country, so when I showed up at the airport without a birth certificate and/or a passport, they wouldn’t let me on the plane. The good news was that Continental was so kind as to […]

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